Attention: Campaigns, Lore, and Writing for EC

A bunch of you know I'm a crazy Lore nerd for EC, and one of the biggest advocates for campaigns and how they need to work since basically their inception. A week or so ago, @Oveur reached out to me and gave me permission to head up a team of volunteers tasked with turning the Lore and Campaigns into a more efficient process. Effective yesterday I am EC's "Editor of the volunteer program yet to be named that works with storyline." Honestly our name is secondary to our mission. We'll get there.

So my team's mandate will be simple, but comes in a few interconnected parts. Before we get moving and you see what we're working on I wanted to let you guys know what our mission is, where we're starting, and where we want to head. Set the right expectations right out of the gate. That sort of thing.

Our Mission:

Update the Official Lore of Eternal Crusade. Our license pins us to the end of the 13th Black Crusade in 999.m41, but we have lore details that GW has changed/retconned in their main storyline since Ivan and Graham wrote the setting fiction. We could do alternate realities, but that's a cop-out and would take too much explaining to someone coming to the game having just put away their Sanctus Reach box, for example. Some characters that haven't been revealed yet are now somewhere totally different in the galaxy, and others who were not available are suddenly either dead or free to use. We're almost done on that front thanks to the awesome work of Ivan and Graham.

Draft the official "Setting Bible" and keep it up-to-date. Every TV show, movie, game, or novel series has a "Setting Bible," a document that is the one-stop-shop to establish the background, context, and themes of its product. Loyalists have certain themes and ways of doing things that would make no sense if done by an Eldar instead, for example. This codifies what EC and we as the editors feel creates a narratively consistent world to set our story, because...

Cut down our dependence on Lore/Canon NPCs in favor of Liaisons we have greater narrative control over. Its great to know Abaddon is taking a PERSONAL interest in your efforts, but as has come up a few times in Lore and Story threads, it doesn't always make narrative sense that the Warmaster would have you out killing 6 raccoons or picking 4 juliper flowers.

Draft a new set of 6 Campaigns using the Warzone/Seasonal model. In brief (and I will reply here and expand on the concept we're running with,) we draft a batch of 6-8 Missions for each Faction, and those 24-32 Missions form a single narrative arc we're calling a Warzone. Each Warzone to follow will build on both the established backstory in the Setting Bible as well as the results of previous Warzones.

Create the pipeline for Community-submitted Faction Missions. Just as we are volunteers, we're looking for other volunteers to help us unfold the story of Arkhona/Orkona. Using the Setting Bible and a curated timeline outlining the ongoing history of the Eternal Crusade, Community members will be able to submit campaign ideas to us to be reviewed with an eye toward fleshing out side stories within the world.

Review existing game elements and offer suggestions to the team on how to modify them to add more backstory to the interface. Some things in-game now have Lore justifications for being there, and by reviewing things like the 'boiler plates' on each continent we can insert some backstory in for those who want to know why certain things in the world are the way they are.

Our Limitations:

We can't change game systems. No matter what we WANT to do, our primary benchmark is to use the tools we have at hand. No, we can't do away with the Global Campaign system, and so we plan to use both it and to dove-tail the Personal Goals system in, too. No, we can't make the game go open world. No, we can't create assets out of thin air. Most importantly, we can’t magically make the entire approval process into a streamlined "yes/no" so that each Mission week after week tells a continuation of the same story (that's not how real life or writing works, anyway.)

We can't affect anything outside the Kharon System. Per the license, the Kharon system and Arkhona proper are CANON to the 40K universe, but they keep their hands off and we promise not to execute Abaddon or fly a special Op to Cadia to put "warp-insulators" on the Towers that contain the Eye of Terror. That said, if we need to blow up a planet in-system, we do it. If it makes narrative sense to kill off a non-GW NPC to advance a story, that person is gonna die. Part of our desire to move to Factional Liaisons over a single Warlord barking orders is so that we have the latitude to put them at risk, to make MEANINGFUL narrative arcs out of their battles on Arkhona, and to make our rise to glory reflected in theirs and vice-versa. We just can't go see Big E anytime soon...

Story advancement is going to be a slow-grow process, so patience on both sides will be essential. Rapid iteration isn't possible when you are submitting batches of story at a time, which the Dev team needs to make sure everything needed is acquired and formatted in such a way as to be usable in the campaign interface. This is why we're looking at narrative arcs in terms of Warzone-by-Warzone rather than Mission-by-Mission.

This won't be an overnight process, though most of our groundwork is nearing completion.

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Has the ToC Librarius contacted you yet. i let them know, they basically write and maintain our lore and i know they voiced interest in participating. If they haven't i shall shake the tree again at our next event.

I'd love to join you, but realistically I ain't got the time I'm really excited for the first warzone!

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We are too! As for helping or availability, we're going to have opportunities to help shape the story (this is sort of a 'between worlds' project, as I have one foot in the Dev world and one foot here so I want to keep my finger on the pulse of the story that the players see emerging.

Has the ToC Librarius contacted you yet. i let them know, they basically write and maintain our lore and i know they voiced interest in participating. If they haven't i shall shake the tree again at our next event.

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Nobody has yet, but then again I'm in the "Mountain moving to Mohammad" phase right now where I'm reaching out to specific people, so until yesterday nobody knew I was working on a specific project.

@Katzu_HSM Thought you were not basing lore on the players but custom generated characters instead?

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I'm not basing lore on players or guilds, but if somebody wants to help I can use as many hands are willing to write. Many hands make light work. Like people can write their own lore elsewhere attached to the main lore, but it won't be added to the main lore. Think of it like autobiographies as opposed to history books. Make sense?

Let me know if I can be a part of this I looove the 40k universe and wrote a a few dozen fanfics for the Praetorian Guard and a handful of others last year. PM if you want the samples to see if I can be useful.

I dont think there is an need to write an new narrative text each time. The campaigns could go on automated unless there will be an special reward. Kind of like automated tournaments.

For Chaos this could be 'the Long War #' with # being number of week. Every 7(or 10 or how many days you like to have an campaign) days the campaign would auto-restart upon conclusion. When an campaign with an special reward(such as cosmetic item) wants to be done, then instead fe. 'the Long War #45' you run 'Custom campaign with its narrative' and continues with 'the Long War #46' after its conclusion. Ofcourse other races get their versions of this unending campaign too, it can be 'Eternal Crusade' for Lsm, 'da Waaaagh' for Orks, 'Signs of a Prophecy'(?) for eldar.
The reward for those automated campaigns will remain in the meager spectrum, the larger reward gains reserved for narrated ones.

Still, as that way players can get an constant source of Rtc it can help to keep what remains of players ingame.